[Cryptography] Toxic Combination
Bill Frantz
frantz at pwpconsult.com
Fri Dec 12 01:15:47 EST 2014
On 12/11/14 at 12:25 AM, grarpamp at gmail.com (grarpamp) wrote:
>What is the revenue model of AES, OpenPGP, SHA3, ECDHE...?
In the case of AES, many companies agreed they needed a common,
trusted encryption algorithm to replace DES. NIST ran a
competition to select one and AES was the result. Many companies
have build products that incorporate AES. QED
In the case of OpenPGP, PGP was built by Phil Zimmermann for
political reasons to protect activist's data. Commercial use
required a fee. I agree that PGP was not primarily motivated by
the profit motive. Its success was due to being the only choice
available, and the fact that it worked. Note that PGP
Corporation was a purely commercial enterprise based on PGP.
SHA3's history is similar to AES. It is also driven by
commercial interests which need compatibility and trust.
The Diffie Hellman algorithm was granted U.S. Patent 4,200,770
and was assigned to Stanford University. While Stanford's
interest was primarily in encouraging academic research, they
did try to make money licensing the patent. ECDHE is an
implementation of Diffie Hellman using elliptic curves instead
of modular integer multiplication which gives faster
implementation with smaller data. Again, the commercial
interests drove ECDH's adoption (after negotiating a minefield
of patents).
>What of protocol creator Bitcoin, Pond, FOSS... where the revenue them?
I wouldn't be surprised if the developer of the Bitcoin protocol
didn't extract some money as an early adopter. There is, of
course, no proof.
I don't recognize Pond or FOSS, and I've done enough free
research for tonight.
Cheers - Bill
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